La reafirmación de la masculinidad en la cruzada franquista

After the First World War, the soldier became the masculine archetype. Aggression was intrinsic to contemporary understandings of masculinity: the ‘new Fascist man’ would be the agent of political and social change. The military coup of July 1936 was a call to men to renew Spain. Falangist ideas of male beauty, brotherhood and comradeship in arms created a new understanding of masculinity in Spain. This cult of virility was instrumental to Franco’s mobilisation during the civil war and seemed to be reinforced by victory. However, the horizontal communities of fascist brotherhood were soon jettisoned, replaced by the vertical connections of history and family hierarchy, so important in the Carlist tradition. Paternalism, not fascism, was the key to the understanding of masculinity fostered by the New State during the postwar.